I've turned on youtube image stabilsation in this video, please tell me what you think.I have to decide whether or not to keep it. I think I have 24 hours to revert back, otherwise I'm stuck with stabilised version.

Really weird effect, it is charging the field of view all the time. Stretching the edges/corners. Doesn't work too well with almost stationary shots, in moving scenes didn't notice anything weird. Maybe try Deshaker plugin for Virtualdub instead?

Dave,Nice video. Interesting and relaxed.But you really kill us when we see what the Sydney weather is in the winter.In Sweden we have -5 to -10° and snow during 2-3 months and then rain and 10-15° 6-7 months.Now in the summer we are lucky if we got around 20°C.It is a mystery why anyone want to stay here..../Roger

A huge shame really, he consistently came down just on the wrong side of the price <> quality trade-off. Just a few extra pennies spent here and there would have made for much better and more reliable products. The ZX80 voltage regulator heat sink was too small and caused it to overheat. They got it pretty much right with the ZX81, but then made the same mistake on the first issue of the ZX Spectrum. All for the sake of a piece of aluminium that should have been a bit bigger, and must have ended up costing them a small fortune in replacement.

Micro Men is a surprisingly good film. Even though the disclaimer says it isn't all true and scenes were inserted for dramatic purposes, a lot of the details are spot on. Even the chap they got to play Rick Dickinson, the industrial designer, looks a lot like him. There is a nice cameo near the end, the landlady behind the pub bar is Sophie Wilson, half of the ARM design team.

The C5 might have got a bit of traction if it had been introduced in the 1960s..----it looked like something out of El Cheapo British science fiction of that period.

They could have got "Twiggy" or someone to drive one & picked up free publicity. After all that was the time of the "Swinging Sixties" when all sorts of crap appeared,& maybe sold a few items.

Anyone remember the "Moulton Bicycle"--it had tiny wheels which were supposed to have some benefits.

But the '80s---I don't think so!

Many Brits of that time were not sure where their next quid was coming from,let alone forking out 399 of them for a "car",which after you "had a look under the bonnet",looked like something you could put together in your back shed.You could probably have picked up a reasonable old motorbike for that,or an "Old Banger" car!

I worked for Sinclair Research in the mid-80s as a snotty-nosed teenaged Z80 programmer. I joined the day the C5 launched and worked initially in Sinclair's London office (a tiny place with just Clive, his secretary, his father and me - it's a long story...). So I came out of work and there outside the office was the C5 that Clive had been driving at the launch event - widely covered on the telly. But, nobody knew what to do with it - it was a Friday afternoon, it wouldn't fit through the doorway into the office and you couldn't just leave it there. So light, someone could have picked it up and walked away with it.

"I know!" I said. "I'll drive it home and look after it over the weekend!"

"You've just been on the TV telling everyone how safe it is," I said (teenagers, eh?). "What can go wrong?"

"Errr... OK" he said. What else could he have done?

So I drove it from Chelsea to Chiswick through the London rush hour traffic. Got a lot of attention - after all, it'd had been on the TV all day - and it felt really good.

Until I got to Hammersmith, about three miles from the office and about two from home, when the battery ran out. The advertised range was not quite working out... peddling it (with no gearbox) all the way home was not nearly as much fun.

"Yes," said Clive on the Monday. "There may be some bugs to work out..." Can't remember how we got it back - I think by van.

Some more background on it: it was designed by a couple of chaps at Milton Hall, home of Sinclair Research's Metalab in Cambridge, in conjunction with various suppliers. The P. Newman who co-authored the Unofficial C5 document is Perran Newman, who became my boss at Sinclair after I moved to Cambridge; we worked together on a few projects, including the Pandora portable Spectrum (yet another story).

The "washing machine" motor was in fact a variant of one used for electric torpedoes. The ULA was a typical Sinclair component; the Ferranti ULA in the ZX81 was the first such in any consumer device, and Sinclair had a preference for them over other solutions. It was possible - although I never took part - to put two batteries in series and go very fast indeed, I think the unofficial record was 30 MPH, if you didn't do it for too long. Sinclair engineers were an eccentric bunch, and did things like go jousting in muddy fields in Citroen 2CVs.

But so much on it was just too pared back - the nylon gears that stripped, the batteries that were just too wimpy, those brakes... and, yeah, the British weather. There was a sort of cagoule which clipped around the front of the driving space, but that made you look even more like Davros than before.

Man, that thing has so much potential, the main problem i see is how steering is handled; you can solve the nylon gears, the battery, the motor, not being able to see behind you all easily, but how the steering is done, not so much

Man, that thing has so much potential, the main problem i see is how steering is handled; you can solve the nylon gears, the battery, the motor, not being able to see behind you all easily, but how the steering is done, not so much

Actually, the steering works pretty well (provided you are the right height) and is quite natural. You instantly feel comfortable with it. That is the least of the issues.

Nothing like the smell of rosin core solder in the morning."Could you not use some of that crowdfunded $1.5 million to hire a graphic designer who understands perspective?" -Delta"A soldering station I bought once had a sticker on it that said, I shit you not, 'QENUINE'." -c4757p